[HN Gopher] Doctorow: American tech cartels use apps to break th...
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Doctorow: American tech cartels use apps to break the law
Author : ohjeez
Score : 248 points
Date : 2025-10-08 16:47 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lithub.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (lithub.com)
| legitster wrote:
| > Competition is an essential component of effective regulation,
| for two reasons: First, competition keeps the companies within a
| sector from all telling the same lie to its regulators.
|
| I'm as pro-competition as anybody, but I don't actually buy this
| argument.
|
| Firstly, regulating a thousand small players is much harder than
| regulating a few. Which is why there is a lot of evidence that
| regulation (even when good or needed) eliminates some amount of
| competition - crash and emission testing put an end to new car
| manufacturers for a long time.
|
| Secondly, in industries with lots of competition and individual
| actors (real estate, healthcare, finance, etc) regulatory capture
| is _actually far worse_! Increasing the sheer number of special
| interests does not, in fact, improve regulation. And if anything,
| smearing it across as many voting districts as possible gives a
| level of political entrenchment that software companies could
| only dream of.
|
| Let me flip the Airbnb argument on its head - why are _hotels_
| allowed to build dense dormitory-style housing in cities where it
| 's otherwise illegal to do so? Because their regulatory capture
| is so entrenched that we don't even think about it.
| lokar wrote:
| Hotels are allowed to do that because democratically elected
| representatives passed laws to allow it, subject to strict
| regulations.
| dleeftink wrote:
| It's process over product, but somehow we've come to regard
| the 'product' as end goal over all else. Yet no product lasts
| forever.
| legitster wrote:
| This is backwards. Hotels have always existed, but zoning
| restrictions on who or what could be a hotel came afterwards
| through law.
| lokar wrote:
| Most modern (20th century) regulations on topics like
| hotels were formalizations of existing socially accepted
| practices and often attempts to address obvious issues (eg
| many guests unable to escape a fire).
| dingnuts wrote:
| Hotels are a specially designated category for temporary
| housing so that permanent residents can exclude travelers from
| their neighborhoods.
|
| You aren't flipping it on its head at all, the reason hotels
| exist is because travelers exist and need somewhere to go.
|
| Why does Airbnb think they have a right to invert the social
| contract that has created a designated place for people who are
| likely to not know local norms and be operating on strange
| hours?
| aag wrote:
| I like the modern social contract and hotels, but to be fair,
| AirBNB is inverting what had already been inverted. In some
| sense, AirBNB is returning to the old model before hotels
| were everywhere. A traveler would reach a new town and ask
| for lodging in someone's home. In many countries, providing
| lodging to strangers is still the norm.
| Scrapemist wrote:
| Yes, inverting it back to before there was regulations and
| a massive tourism industry.
| piva00 wrote:
| The only travelers at that time arriving by the thousands
| would be armies, it's not comparable when scale matters.
| Aloisius wrote:
| Em. Tourism has been a thing, complete with travel
| guides, tour operators, souvenirs made for tourists and
| tourist attractions for millennia.
|
| Plenty of major destinations (holy places, resorts, etc)
| would bring in thousands of tourists at a time. The
| ancient Olympics, for instance, brought in tens of
| thousands of visitors.
| neerajk wrote:
| Am I allowed to stay with a relative or a friend when I visit
| their town? I am totally ignorant of local norms, maybe I
| should be in the Holiday Inn next door instead?
| monknomo wrote:
| but you aren't doing that when you stay at airbnb
| billy99k wrote:
| "not know local norms and be operating on strange hours?"
|
| What 'local norms' are so different that you won't understand
| them as a traveler? 99.9% of the population sleep and wake up
| at the same time. You just need to be a decent human being.
| afavour wrote:
| Yeah I don't buy OP's "local norms" argument but as someone
| who lived in the same building as an AirBnB it's inarguable
| to me that it affects the standard of living for others in
| the building.
|
| The hallways got scuffed up, some guests were excessively
| noisy, dropped trash all over the place, broke stuff... as
| a permanent resident if you do that you face consequences.
| As someone only resident for a weekend it makes no
| difference to you.
| legitster wrote:
| > Why does Airbnb think they have a right to invert the
| social contract
|
| Firstly, vacation homes existed and were legal long before
| Airbnb - but finding one anywhere was expensive and a a
| massive PITA.
|
| Secondly, who's social contract?
| bix6 wrote:
| And now they're easy to find and everyone buys them for
| investment which crowds out community members.
|
| The neighborhood social contract. The one where I know my
| neighbors and we build a vibrant community. Instead of the
| drunk idiots who show up for 3 days and throw their beer
| bottles on the ground.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Funny, in my experience Airbnb never captured the vacation
| home market to anywhere near the degree of the apartment in
| a popular city market. Where I am you still have a much
| better bet of finding a vacation home via the websites that
| existed previously than Airbnb.
|
| Also there is a reason why places places with lots of
| vacation homes are considered expensive an dnot the most
| pleasant to live at permanently. That's why cities etc
| regulated, they dis not want them to turn into holiday
| parks.
| wil421 wrote:
| Travel management companies and other business who rent
| property for tourism have been doing this for decades. I
| have several great small websites that had cabins or short
| term rentals in cities I frequent and I wasn't getting
| killed my stupid cleaning prices or junk fees.
|
| Some of the cabin rental companies I rent from have been
| around since the 90s.
| agentcoops wrote:
| Completely agreed: the way he articulates the problem is self-
| defeating. Apologies if this sounds absurdly abstract or hand-
| wavy, but I think the correct framing really has more to do
| with a sort of essential clash between law and software as
| technologies of social regulation.
|
| Written law was something very important historically: from
| unwritten norms to codified representations that, however
| imperfect and provisional, were more or less accessible to all
| and changeable through whatever process, democratic or
| otherwise. Over the last decades, we -- and this could be taken
| rather literally as "the readers of hacker news" -- have been
| encoding so many aspects of the world into software in a way
| that doesn't clearly coincide with the legal norms of any
| particular let alone every country.
|
| On the one hand, software is clearly "better" than law in at
| least the sense that the former eliminates the necessary
| ambiguity of the latter: the interpretation or "implementation
| details" of even just a particular law are always disputed.
| Perhaps a particular implementation of cross-border financial
| transactions, say, or of personal identity doesn't in fact
| reflect what the developers or product managers intended, but
| if that is identified it can be changed.
|
| Yet, on the other hand, it is certainly true that, from the
| perspective of regulators let alone the masses, the resulting
| situation is much closer to pre-law. Nobody has any idea how or
| why they were suddenly banned from Instagram or their PayPal
| account closed, let alone how money actually moves around the
| world when they send a friend funds through Transferwise.
| Certainly, if we don't even know how things are working there
| is no process by which it could be decided that things should
| work differently, let alone a process by which software would
| concretely be made to work differently.
|
| Indeed, I am skeptical that law as such will ever be able to
| regulate software: even just considering the problem in terms
| of a single country/legal system, how does one actually
| guarantee that the ever-changing corpus of code complies with
| the ever-changing and essentially ambiguous body of
| regulations? One of course sees this with the EU as the "avant-
| garde" of the struggle to regulate software. They pursue either
| these incredibly general wars on "cookies" that don't solve
| real problems, or endlessly deliberate when it's already too
| late about how to handle AI, or produce something relatively
| well-conceived like GDPR where enforcement is then incredibly
| unclear if not impossible.
|
| TLDR I have no idea what the solution is, but I think the
| intrinsic problem of law and software is incredibly important
| to take seriously as software eats the world. At the very
| least, it's not just a problem of "competition" since, as you
| note, monopoly is at least one sufficient condition [1] of
| eventually rendering the way software regulates the world
| transparent and open to change.
|
| [1] Undoubtedly, there are other ways this could possibly
| transpire through open source etcetc -- however, even in that
| case there has to be a guarantee that particular software
| defines the operations of a particular domain, i.e. that there
| exists software through which one can understand that domain
| and hypothetically change, which is in some sense just a
| "public" monopoly.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I disagree. Finance is a good example. The core regulated parts
| of finance like retail and commercial banking are pretty good.
| Costs are low, they've gotten more efficient, services are
| uniform and poor performers get purged.
|
| The issues with finance are on the edges and areas where there
| are really a small number of industry players. They have an
| outsized impact and the worst practices are usually skirting
| the regulatory framework.
|
| The Airbnb argument isn't regulatory capture example - the
| issue there is that it's impossible to build anything. You have
| to build a giant hotel to justify the overhead of building
| anything hotel. Airbnb fills a gap of creative reuse and
| provides a tax shelter for rich people.
| anovikov wrote:
| How does Airbnb provide a tax shelter? Also aren't they all
| doing "buy, borrow, die" thing so don't need a tax shelter?
| Spooky23 wrote:
| The "big beautiful bill" essentially subsidizes short term
| rentals by allowing investors to fully depreciate the
| properties year 1.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| > Because their regulatory capture is so entrenched that we
| don't even think about it.
|
| Nonsense. Residents don't complain about hotels because of the
| perception that hotels are too expensive for poor and working-
| class people to afford. Whereas the perception of apartments is
| that they are cheap enough that such people will choose to live
| in them.
|
| It's all about not wanting to live near "poor" people.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Clearly your familiarity with lower-tier hotels is limited.
| People can and do complain when Motel 6 wants to build.
|
| > It's all about not wanting to live near "poor" people.
|
| That much is true. And mostly because poor people make poor
| neighbors.
| yed wrote:
| It depends on whether you're measuring competition as "number
| of competitors" or "market concentration". You can have a lot
| of actors but still have high concentration. Healthcare for
| example has many actors but the concentration is very high
| among the big health systems and insurance providers.
| lesuorac wrote:
| > Firstly, regulating a thousand small players is much harder
| than regulating a few.
|
| I don't agree with this.
|
| Get you and a thousand friends to submit fake mortgages
| documents and let me know how many of you end up in jail.
| Compare that too how many people went to jail from Wells Fargo.
|
| More smaller players is easier to regulate because you can
| literally use any punishments. If you dissolve Wells Fargo the
| economy is going to throw a fit (see Enron) but if you dissolve
| a tiny company then nobody cares.
|
| Real Estate and Healthcare seem to be pretty highly
| concentrated industries imo. Even though there are a zillion
| agents/doctors they're part of a professional guild and that
| guild does the lobbying on their behalf. Like good luck getting
| antibiotics on your own but after a doctor looks at you for 1
| minute you have a prescription for the same drug you always
| take for an ear infection.
| usrxcghghj wrote:
| People take regulations for granted. The economics not only
| survive, they thrive. It doesn't exist in a vacuum. Protected
| citizenry is happier and more productive.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| It's really quite easy to regulate many small competing
| entities. There are plenty of people ready to fill the role of
| IRS agent, and even the cost is relatively trivial.
|
| What's practically impossible is regulating a few
| anticompetitive megacorporations. You can't regulate an entity
| that writes your nation's laws.
| SJC_Hacker wrote:
| > The death of competition spells doom for regulation.
| Competition is an essential component of effective regulation,
| for two reasons: First, competition keeps the companies within a
| sector from all telling the same lie to its regulators. Second,
| competition erodes companies' profits and thus starves them of
| the capital they need to overpower or outmaneuver their
| regulators.
|
| Yeah, maybe you can start with Rogers Wireless. Eh, Cory?
| mads_quist wrote:
| Yes, they use apps to break the law. But, still, regulation -
| when in doubt - should be avoided. Did you know that in Germany,
| you need to send your employees to a specialised training if they
| use a ladder in their day to day work? You don't need to regulate
| what's common sense.
| hedora wrote:
| That's true in the US too.
|
| We had someone come to our house to work on a range hood. They
| didn't have ladder training, so the insurance company wouldn't
| cover it if they fell off the ladder.
|
| The range hood repairman left without doing any work. I do
| wonder what a normal day at work looks like for this person. We
| weren't billed for the house call.
| mothballed wrote:
| Lol you must not live in the country.
|
| Par for the course for a vanload of meth-heads who've never
| attended an hour of formal training in their life to be
| walking around a 45 degree roof without a harness, or one
| clipped into an ornamental non-structural member.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Haha very true. Last time I had a roof done, several cases
| of Natural Ice were consumed by the working party. The roof
| was perfect though.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| What is ridiculous is that you think this isn't a good idea.
| Safely using ladders isn't common sense and ladder injuries
| probably cost the state and the places where they occur a lot
| of money.
|
| I think you are mistaking your point of view, which is probably
| that of an individual business owner, for the point of view of
| someone looking at the actuarial statistics or whatever and
| seeing tens of thousands of preventable ladder injuries a year.
| Just because an event is rare _from your point of view_ doesn
| 't mean that the event costs nothing or that it should be
| ignored.
|
| I can't believe how common this attitude of "if its too small
| for me to notice it doesn't matter" is.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| I love this comment. I am so sick and tired of the term
| "common sense" being used as a panacea for those on the
| bottom of a Dunning Kruger curve to justify wanting their
| ignorance to be taken as seriously as other people's
| knowledge. I can think of dozens of ways someone could misuse
| a ladder that would definitely result in property damage and
| quite possibly injuries and even fatalities.
|
| I wonder how many people are killed yearly because they buy
| various tools and don't read the damn instructions because
| they're definitely smart enough to use this and be safe
| already, it's common sense after all!
| sebastos wrote:
| The analysis isn't done yet though: - How much do you trust
| the statistics about which ladder deaths were preventable? -
| Do you have the numbers on the counter-factual: once ladder
| training is introduced, these sub-populations see X reduction
| in ladder deaths, offsetting for reduction in ladder use due
| to people not having their ladder license? - What is the
| productivity cost of assigning every single ladder user a
| training class, in perpetuity? This analysis should include
| the cost of creating a cottage ladder training industry that
| provides the trainings, the hourly productivity loss of
| sending people to trainings, the administrative cost of
| ensuring the trainings have been conformed to, etc.
|
| In your heart of hearts, when you are assigned mandatory
| trainings, how much do you learn? I'm not asking how much
| _could_ you learn, I'm asking how much DO you learn? My
| experience, and the obvious unspoken consensus of all my
| colleagues, is that you click through mandatory virtual
| trainings as fast as possible, with the sound down, on fast-
| forward. If it's a live training with an actual practical
| skill (like ladder training), then I'd definitely concede
| it's much more engaging and you probably learn something. But
| MANY trainings are clearly, obviously, a net friction on
| society.
|
| "I see a problem - how about we make a law that everybody
| must learn about that thing?" is the crappiest, laziest way
| to address the problem that you could possibly think of. If
| 'mandate a training' was analogized to a pull request on a
| codebase, it would be like responding to a bug report by
| adding a pop-up dialog that always pops up whenever you open
| the program and warns you about the bug. In other words, the
| shittiest possible non-solution that lets somebody close the
| issue as resolved. A real solution takes more work and more
| thinking.
| buellerbueller wrote:
| I trust the statistics far more than {RANDOM BUSINESS
| OWNER|ANECTATA}
| Scrapemist wrote:
| Did you know in the US Federal law does not require any
| specific licensing or safety training to purchase a firearm.
| ako wrote:
| You do need to regulate what is common sense to protect
| employees. There's a lot of pressure from employers to do
| things that go against common sense, accidents happen. The
| employee is hurt, employer doesn't care. A large role of
| regulation is to protect employees from greedy employers.
| That's why some employers like illegals, they don't complain
| about not following regulations.
| haunter wrote:
| >You don't need to regulate what's common sense.
|
| Americans: hold my AR15
| mothballed wrote:
| Most state do require a security license though to carry a
| weapon for remuneration (not needed if just for personal
| protection).
| klaff wrote:
| Have you considered whether such training might possibly have a
| positive result?
|
| "In 2023, the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons reported
| that 500,000 people were treated for ladder-related injuries,
| with 300 of these incidents proving fatal." from
| https://www.usf.edu/health/public-health/news/2024/cc-ladder...
| cycomanic wrote:
| That's such a gross simplification that it's highly misleading.
| Yes you need training to if your work involves ladders, just
| like any other tool that is potentially dangerous. The type of
| training highly depends on the danger, so for someone using a
| stepladder to get something from a shelf will not need more
| than "use the ladder from the closet, put it back after use",
| while someone climbing up to the antennas on a skyscraper will
| receive very different training (i.e. always clip in your
| safety harness, how to use double carabiners ...). I don't know
| how this is controversial?
| cosmicgadget wrote:
| What idiot would ever use a ladder in a dangerous way?
|
| It's me, I'm the idiot.
|
| Standing on the top step? Yes. Putting a hammer on the top step
| and forgetting about it? Uh huh. Putting the ladder on plywood
| on a mattress so I could change a lightbulb without moving the
| bed and buying a taller ladder? You better believe it. Using a
| paint sprayer with a 25' latter and no spotter? Absolutely not.
| Wait, yes.
|
| There are dozens of us:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/MenonUnstableLadders/
| tolerance wrote:
| Writing/Reading exercise: Consider this article from the
| perspective of someone who is _pro_ -ICEBlock-being-removed-from-
| the-Apple-App-Store.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Pretty nonsensical argument. Uber isn't an employer not because
| it's an app but because it's a service that connects you to
| someone. Your phone company isn't an employer just because you
| use them to hire a handyman.
|
| So wordy only to use a nonsensical strawman. I get it: you're
| trying to create a new buzzword the way you did with
| "enshittification". So the usual suspects will be big fans. Good
| luck.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Who pays the driver?
| jeffbee wrote:
| I would caution against using this as a discriminator, since
| the scheme whereby you are billed by the phone company for
| third-party services has long existed, but that doesn't make
| AT&T your boss.
| efnx wrote:
| Do you mean "but that doesn't make AT&T _their_ boss"?
| Because in this scenario I'm paying AT&T, right?
| efnx wrote:
| Exactly. If Uber is really just providing a service to the
| drivers, the drivers should be paying a subscription to Uber
| while taking money directly from the customer.
|
| (Edit) And they should be setting their own prices!
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| Surely there are alternatives to Uber then?
| jeffbee wrote:
| There is a lot of jurisprudence regarding whether or not the
| employer-employee relationship exists, and you can't simply
| dismiss that with a few words. Obviously the phone company does
| not employ the handyman, because if the handyman declines to
| fix your house the phone company is not going to disconnect his
| phone. But in the case of Uber, Uber absolutely will throw a
| driver off the platform unless they hew to a strict set of
| behaviors.
| novemp wrote:
| If Uber is just a service that connects you to someone, why
| does Uber take the majority of a user's payment and why is it
| against Uber's TOS to share contact information with your
| drivers so you can call them and ask for a ride outside the
| app?
| Apes wrote:
| I think you have a strong argument here, but there's a
| problem of deeper and widespread rot at play.
|
| The reason Uber can get away with pretending it's just a
| "connector" is because the entire tech ecosystem has been
| allowed to normalize that kind of control without
| accountability.
|
| Look at Apple and Google: they take a 30% cut on every sale
| and ban any competing payment systems. That's the same
| pattern - absolute gatekeeping disguised as "market
| facilitation."
|
| Our regulators have become so complacent that this behavior
| is now seen as the default way digital markets work. The
| problem isn't just Uber's misclassification; it's that the
| entire platform economy is built on pretending these
| companies are neutral middlemen when they're really
| gatekeepers.
| lapcat wrote:
| I would say that regulatory capture is merely a consequence of
| political capture. The politicians write the regulations,
| supervise the regulators, and in most cases, appoint the judges.
|
| How did Microsoft avoid breakup in 2001? Simple: George W. Bush
| was elected President, and the Bush administration decided to
| settle the court case with a slap on the wrist. Don't blame the
| regulators but rather the politicians.
|
| It's ironic that Doctorow uses the example of "whether you should
| heed your doctor's advice to get vaccinated", because the
| regulators all support vaccination, but again as a result of a
| Presidential election, HHS has been politically captured by an
| anti-vaxxer who ignores expert advice.
| cycomanic wrote:
| > I would say that regulatory capture is merely a consequence
| of political capture. The politicians write the regulations,
| supervise the regulators, and in most cases, appoint the
| judges. > > How did Microsoft avoid breakup in 2001? Simple:
| George W. Bush was elected President, and the Bush
| administration decided to settle the court case with a slap on
| the wrist. Don't blame the regulators but rather the
| politicians. >
|
| But he addresses that in the post, by saying that these
| monopoly/olipolyies actors can amass massive war chests that
| make them become bigger than the regulator. So by the time MS
| was a monopoly it was already too late.
| lapcat wrote:
| > these monopoly/olipolyies actors can amass massive war
| chests that make them become bigger than the regulator.
|
| Bigger than the POTUS? And why wasn't the previous Clinton
| administration captured?
|
| But it's actually quite clear from the article that the
| regulators are _not_ politicians:
|
| > In a modern society, that third party is an expert
| regulator who investigates or anticipates problems in their
| area of expertise and then makes rules designed to solve
| these problems.
|
| > To make these rules, the regulator convenes a truth-seeking
| exercise
|
| > the regulator--who is a neutral expert, required to recuse
| themselves if they have conflicts--makes a rule, citing the
| evidence on which the rule is based.
| mallowdram wrote:
| Fundamentally the issues precede the end states. Neither present-
| day software nor law-government are efficient enough to service
| the users to whom the possibilities (and deficiencies) are now
| apparent to the developers. Tech didn't create new formats it
| merely reformatted them into databases. Both are trapped in their
| inefficiencies which force the reduction of competition or their
| monopoly. The state is a myth we workaround by going global.
| Software operates arbitrary things and then automates them as
| expedient interfaces that disperse and charge access for what is
| ultimately specific (a good or service). Decent was a trial and
| error workaround that simply creates status.
|
| Doctorow pretends these are the ultimate forms, which s how his
| answers are palliatives not solutions.
|
| It's strange how bureaucratic Silicon Valley has become in
| relation to his bureaucratic prose, the tech industry once saw
| solutions beyond the available tech, now it's buried in
| consultancy rebuttal and Friedman myth ("competition is good").
|
| We have behemoth Goliaths that are living dinosaurs that engage
| in hierarchical domination of what are really illusions: text,
| symbols, images. All we need now are the behemoths to mint their
| own $, copyright it and the circle is complete. Yet these are
| merely simulations in search of a reality that AI can't deliver,
| and so the behemoths are using all techniques to remain relevant.
| It's stillnly one step ahead of a magic act. Obviously they are
| finished, ready for obliteration by insightful, imaginative
| succession. Bureaucracies are all targets for replacement,
| especially Doctorow's type of prose.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Doctorow should be tried in absentia by professors of English
| composition, on the charges of poisoning the discourse with his
| stupid word, and of making posters incorrectly believe they have
| scored a profound point by including it in their sentences.
|
| Anyway let's dismantle these rickety arguments. 1) That RealPage
| says they can break the law because they are an app. This has no
| factual basis. You can read RealPage's argument[1] and draw your
| own conclusion. RealPage argues that they do not engage in price
| fixing, they distribute marketplace data which is protected by
| the First Amendment. No aspect of this argument has anything to
| do with means or venue. Indeed, the debate is exactly the
| opposite of what Doctorow suggests. RealPage's opponents are
| saying that RealPage must be regulated _because_ they are a
| software platform, even though their activities would obviously
| be protected by the First Amendment in any other context.
| Doctorow fails to address the First Amendment implications.
|
| 2) That competitive markets have brought us things like antilock
| brakes. This lacks even the slightest resemblance to reality. The
| only reason we have widespread functioning ABS is because the
| whole industry is totally dominated by a few players, and always
| has been, even if the cartel membership has changed over the
| decades. The existence of the cartel and its co-evolution with
| automotive regulators is the enabling reason why the technology
| works. Doctorow throws out this example but does not grapple with
| the implications. He believes you won't think about it.
|
| 1: https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2025/04/re...
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Doctorow is one of those older bloggers from the pre-influencer
| era who realized that they get a lot more eyeballs on their
| content by leaning into memeing and rage baiting than by sober
| analysis. At first it was fun but eventually the rigor of his
| arguments took backseat to his influencer game. What makes him
| particularly interesting is he's an influencer for the type of
| person who claims they hate influencers and the modern social
| media landscape.
|
| I wish he went back to writing cool fiction but I'm guessing
| that's a lot more effort for a lot less influence. And honestly
| he's done his bonafides in the fiction world so it's not like
| he has anything to prove.
|
| (Yes I know he had some fiction out last year but he took a
| long break. Maybe he's back on the fiction horse?)
| reidrac wrote:
| I read what I think is his newest book and I liked it. It
| takes an special author to write a thriller that makes
| spreadsheets exciting.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Doctorow the fiction author and Doctorow the commentator
| must be considered separately.
| baggachipz wrote:
| > I wish he went back to writing cool fiction but I'm
| guessing that's a lot more effort for a lot less influence.
|
| What are you on about, he released a new fiction book last
| year.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| He took a long break during which his commentary output
| really, really increased. I perceived that as a shift in
| focus.
| strbean wrote:
| That RealPage argument is funny. It's not that they can do it
| because they are an app, but because they are a third party. So
| if I create a company that "sells information on the optimal
| price of eggs", and every grocery store in the country aligns
| to that, it's somehow protected speech rather than price
| fixing.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Selling people the order book for Item Z is a business that
| exists for every value of Z, but if you do it for apartments
| suddenly everyone freaks out.
|
| By the way, the market-clearing price of eggs is a
| _government service_ that comes out every day.
| re wrote:
| > _RealPage enforced adherence to its pricing
| recommendations_ through assigning pricing advisors to its
| clients, providing "lease compliance reports" listing the
| names of individual employees who overrode price
| recommendations, requiring employees to provide business
| justifications for price overrides, and offering some
| clients quarterly "performance to market" meetings
| "designed to identify how compliant the client was with
| RealPage's pricing recommendations during the prior
| quarter."
| https://www.tnmd.uscourts.gov/sites/tnmd/files/690.pdf
|
| > The investigation found that RealPage's pricing software
| provides landlords with a shared logic that tends to raise
| rents. _Two types of RealPage's pricing software collect
| nonpublic, competitively sensitive data from landlords to
| feed the algorithms._ Landlords who use RealPage software
| agree to provide their data, knowing that the software
| combines their data with data from other landlords. The
| algorithm then recommends rents -- in many cases increasing
| them. In feedback to RealPage about its software, one
| potential client said: "I always liked this product because
| your algorithm uses proprietary data from other subscribers
| to suggest rents and term. That's classic price fixing."
| https://www.atg.wa.gov/news/news-releases/washington-ag-
| says...
|
| Just "distributing marketplace data".
| jeffbee wrote:
| The allegation that they somehow enforce that price is
| just an allegation. You can write down anything you want
| in a civil complaint in this country.
|
| Anyway, I feel like this thread reinforces my point. We
| are arguing about the merits of the case. We are not
| arguing about whether their obviously illegal behavior is
| okay because it's software.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Third parties publishing market information is a common
| product. It's only price fixing if there's collusion across
| competitors on price.
| cycomanic wrote:
| > Doctorow should be tried in absentia by professors of English
| composition, on the charges of poisoning the discourse with his
| stupid word, and of making posters incorrectly believe they
| have scored a profound point by including it in their
| sentences. > > Anyway let's dismantle these rickety arguments.
| 1) That RealPage says they can break the law because they are
| an app. This has no factual basis. You can read RealPage's
| argument[1] and draw your own conclusion. RealPage argues that
| they do not engage in price fixing, they distribute marketplace
| data which is protected by the First Amendment. No aspect of
| this argument has anything to do with means or venue. Indeed,
| the debate is exactly the opposite of what Doctorow suggests.
| RealPage's opponents are saying that RealPage must be regulated
| _because_ they are a software platform, even though their
| activities would obviously be protected by the First Amendment
| in any other context. Doctorow fails to address the First
| Amendment implications. >
|
| But Doctorows argument is that a non-app service that says,
| "hey we bring all landlords together in a room to discuss how
| we can get the best rents on our properties" would run clearly
| a foul of antitrust laws (and no the activity is not protected
| by free speech). RealPage argument is a distraction, they try
| to muddy the waters and they do it exactly how Doctorow is
| saying, by creating confusion around what their software
| service actually is.
|
| > 2) That competitive markets have brought us things like
| antilock brakes. This lacks even the slightest resemblance to
| reality. The only reason we have widespread functioning ABS is
| because the whole industry is totally dominated by a few
| players, and always has been, even if the cartel membership has
| changed over the decades. The existence of the cartel and its
| co-evolution with automotive regulators is the enabling reason
| why the technology works. Doctorow throws out this example but
| does not grapple with the implications. He believes you won't
| think about it. >
|
| Citation needed
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Walk us through how you think RealPage is going afoul of
| "antitrust laws". I'll presume you're talking about price
| fixing, which is a subset of antitrust laws but separate from
| them (i.e. you don't need to fall afoul of antitrust to be
| convicted of price fixing.)
|
| If I use statistical models to tell a landlord "hey I think
| you can raise your rents from $100 / mo to $115 / mo" how is
| this price fixing? A landlord can follow RealPage's advice
| and then lose business because people aren't willing to pay
| that price to rent housing. Is it price fixing to set higher
| rents? We don't have a "right to low rent" that's somehow
| inherent in housing prices that RealPage is breaking by
| pushing higher rents.
|
| The thing about price fixing is, it's a matter of prisoner's
| dilemma. If any one firm in a price fixing regime defects,
| e.g. they lower prices below the fixed price, they "win" the
| market. If a bunch of landlords collude to offer rents at
| $115 / mo, the first landlord to offer similar properties at
| $100 / mo will immediately win over all prospective tenants.
| To prove that RealPage is performing price fixing, you'd need
| to prove that a substantial portion of landlords are using
| RealPage as a pretext to setting prices concurrently. I find
| this really hard to believe due to the sheer number of
| independent landlords available. If anything the housing
| market is probably more sensitive to price changes because of
| how constrained the supply is in the US.
| cycomanic wrote:
| > Walk us through how you think RealPage is going afoul of
| "antitrust laws". I'll presume you're talking about price
| fixing, which is a subset of antitrust laws but separate
| from them (i.e. you don't need to fall afoul of antitrust
| to be convicted of price fixing.)
|
| If there is a town of 8k rental apartments and I own 4k and
| you own 2k do you agree that we would run afoul of price
| fixing laws if we get together in a room to exchange
| information about our vacancy rates, state of the apartment
| and rents that we currently charge?
|
| If yes, how can it then be legal for a third party to take
| the same information and do some "statistical" analysis
| (the new "it's app so it is not ...") and give us suggested
| rent prices?
|
| > The thing about price fixing is, it's a matter of
| prisoner's dilemma. If any one firm in a price fixing
| regime defects, e.g. they lower prices below the fixed
| price, they "win" the market. If a bunch of landlords
| collude to offer rents at $115 / mo, the first landlord to
| offer similar properties at $100 / mo will immediately win
| over all prospective tenants.
|
| So your argument is price fixing doesn't work?
|
| > To prove that RealPage is performing price fixing, you'd
| need to prove that a substantial portion of landlords are
| using RealPage as a pretext to setting prices concurrently.
| I find this really hard to believe due to the sheer number
| of independent landlords available. If anything the housing
| market is probably more sensitive to price changes because
| of how constrained the supply is in the US.
|
| To put some numbers behind this, in LA independent private
| landlords own 33% of rental properties, that means
| institutional and corporate investors still own the vast
| majority of rental properties.
|
| The big contention in pretty much all lawsuits is how
| "optional" the price recommendations really are.
| jeffbee wrote:
| > If there is a town of 8k rental apartments and I own 4k
| and you own 2k ...
|
| You can't make policy this way. There is no such market
| anywhere in America, where 2 players own a majority
| share. In the case that I cited there is only 1 RealPage
| client in the city and they manage 100 of 30k homes.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| > To put some numbers behind this, in LA independent
| private landlords own 33% of rental properties, that
| means institutional and corporate investors still own the
| vast majority of rental properties.
|
| This figure just shows how many LA properties are owned
| by an LLC or incorporated entity and is a very dubious
| figure. Most landlords incorporate to protect their own
| liability and to have access to business financing. Look
| at [1] for details.
|
| > If there is a town of 8k rental apartments and I own 4k
| and you own 2k do you agree that we would run afoul of
| price fixing laws if we get together in a room to
| exchange information about our vacancy rates, state of
| the apartment and rents that we currently charge?
|
| The problem here has nothing to do with using an app or
| talking to each other. The problem is that there are only
| two landlords. There is no housing market in the entire
| US larger than a subdivision that has this kind of a
| market.
|
| > So your argument is price fixing doesn't work?
|
| Everyone who price fixes has to agree on those prices. If
| a market has a lot of competition it's almost impossible
| to get everyone to agree on prices. And at that point,
| RealPage or price fixing isn't the problem, it's the
| oligopoly in the market.
|
| [1]: https://cayimby.org/blog/institutional-investors-in-
| californ...
| cosmicgadget wrote:
| > let's dismantle these rickety arguments.
|
| Well you certainly win the smugness competition.
|
| > would obviously be protected by the First Amendment in any
| other context
|
| You might be surprised to learn that first amendment protected
| speech can be used to convict people for crimes. That saying
| "I'm going to kill my wife" or "you need to pay protection
| money" has different implications depending on the context.
|
| > The only reason we have widespread functioning ABS is because
| the whole industry is totally dominated by a few players
|
| Got any references to the actual history here? Seems weird that
| all the car manufacturers would conspire to force ABS on us.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| > The McDonald's-backed company Plexure sells surveillance data
| on you to vendors, who use it to raise the price of items when
| they think you'll pay more.
|
| Finally I understand why when the McDonalds app was introduced it
| asked for permission to access my contacts. Of course I refused
| and deleted the app immediately. But to this day whenever I go to
| the McDonalds drive-thru the first question they ask is "Are you
| using the app today?"
|
| McDonalds seems to care so much about their app that I wonder if
| selling personal information makes them more money than selling
| hamburgers.
| lupusreal wrote:
| It sure seems like whenever a corporation grows old, large or
| expansive enough, it will inevitably morph into an spy agency.
| Even what is obstensibly a burger flipping business wants to
| spy on people.
|
| Earlier this week I was in a regional gas station getting
| lunch, they've got maybe 30 or so locations scattered around
| this part of the state, and watched them tell an old man that
| he couldn't get a loyalty card from them anymore because they
| only do apps now. _" But I don't have a cellphone"_ - _"
| Uhhh... You can also do it online?"_
| baggachipz wrote:
| > Even what is obstensibly a burger flipping business
|
| Technically, McDonald's is a real estate company[1] who wants
| to spy on people, but that doesn't make it any less
| egregious.
|
| [1] https://www.wallstreetsurvivor.com/mcdonalds-beyond-the-
| burg...
| xg15 wrote:
| Isn't that technically true for all franchises?
|
| If every restaurant is its own small/medium business and
| the corporate franchisor only ever interacts with the
| franchisees and never with the end customers, then all the
| direct revenue for the franchisor will be from services or
| licenses provided to the franchisees, not from directly
| selling burgers. But the franchisees are still much more
| dependent on the franchisor than they would be in a normal
| B2B relationship. And many of those "service costs" can be
| freely set by the franchisor and have the purpose of
| channeling revenue back from the restaurants - revenue that
| would not exist if no burgers were sold.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| No.
|
| The specific point here is that the McDonald's
| Corporation is often the landlord of its franchisees. Of
| course most franchisees of any franchisor are required to
| buy supplies etc from the franchisor, but McDonald's is
| famous for also charging them rent.
| supportengineer wrote:
| McDonalds is a real estate business. I recommend you check
| out the 2016 movie "The Founder" which is the story of Ray
| Kroc. [0]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Founder
| jvanderbot wrote:
| While very interesting and a great movie, maybe can you
| explain how it's pertinent to this conversation?
| supportengineer wrote:
| >> "Even what is obstensibly a burger flipping business"
| jvanderbot wrote:
| > ostensibly
|
| _probably_ implied they knew.
| the_sleaze_ wrote:
| > McDonalds is a real estate business.
|
| In the same way that American Airlines is a credit card
| company. How much rent will they receive if they stopped
| selling burgers?
|
| > The Founder"
|
| Good movie but McDonalds is a long long way away from
| scrappy, morally-bankrupt Ray Kroc's time. I imagine using
| pink slime to make the nuggets he sold to kids would be
| right in his wheelhouse though.
| walkabout wrote:
| > In the same way that American Airlines is a credit card
| company.
|
| I thought the "they're not what you think" deal with
| airlines is that they're actually futures trading
| companies that happen to own and operate some aircraft?
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| American Airlines is more a credit card company than
| McDonalds is a real estate company. If McDonald's stopped
| collecting rent from its franchisees, there would
| probably be layoffs at corporate but the general public
| would still be able to buy Big Macs.
|
| If American Airlines' credit card revenues dried up they
| wouldn't be able to pay their fuel bills and the company
| would be gone the next day.
| lupusreal wrote:
| _Ostensibly_ ;)
|
| But yes, good movie too.
| adolph wrote:
| > a burger flipping business wants to spy on people
|
| "It started at a Burger-G restaurant in Cary, NC on May 17."
| For example, the Manna software in each store knew about
| employee performance in microscopic detail -- how
| often the employee was on time or early, how quickly
| the employee did tasks, how quickly the employee answered the
| phone and responded to email, how the customers rated
| the employee and so on. When an employee left a store
| and tried to get a new job somewhere else, any other
| Manna system could request the employee's performance record.
| If an employee had "issues" -- late, slow,
| disorganized, unkempt -- it became nearly impossible
| for that employee to get another job.
|
| https://marshallbrain.com/manna2
| AmbroseBierce wrote:
| One good response to that question is "I don't and I never
| will, sorry", some people think you can only vote with your
| wallet but that's not true, they really don't like the hostile
| atmosphere such kind of answers give, so if it became a common
| answer I bet they would stop asking so directly.
| mothballed wrote:
| It's usually asked by AI, at least at Taco Bell. There is no
| human that will feel the hostility.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Are you saying AI takes your order at Taco Bell drive
| through? If so, good thing to avoid.
| znort_ wrote:
| like a glance at the menu wasn't enough ...
|
| btw, i just now did glance at the menu online, i had no
| idea that this crap i wouldn't dare to call food (unless
| i were starving) is currently selling in spain. this is a
| tiny bit depressing but was actually to be expected, and
| i stand by my statement :-)
| mothballed wrote:
| No, just to ask you if you're using the app. After you
| say no a human comes on the intercom. The human doesn't
| have to suffer the abuse of asking about the app,
| wouldn't surprise me if part of that is because it's set
| lots of people in a rage so they let them just vent to a
| computer.
|
| I have no idea what happens if you order through the app,
| maybe in that case it's 100% AI.
| rolph wrote:
| if ones tirade is of sufficient duration, [or volume] the
| human will hear at least part of it.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| On the contrary, some Taco Bell locations are using an
| LLM for the entire order conversation. It's still a human
| that takes your card/cash, but they only state the price
| to be charged, and ask about hot sauce packets. I was so
| unsettled by the experience that I ended up not noticing
| the extra drink they handed me until I made it all the
| way home.
| bitwize wrote:
| It did but I think they're rolling that back now.
| zamadatix wrote:
| The person mandating the question doesn't care if you sound
| hostile to the person at the window, they just care how many
| start using the app.
| rkomorn wrote:
| There are definitely some people who think that directing
| anger and unpleasantness at the person they talk to (who
| has no control over the situation other than choosing not
| to do their job) is a valid approach to providing
| "feedback".
|
| Some sort of "trickle up" mechanism where if enough people
| are sufficiently nasty to frontline workers, it'll get back
| to decision makers who will then change course.
|
| I think that's fantasy and/or rationalization for taking
| things out on others.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Many people here seem to think a customer clearly stating
| their preference is inherently angry and unpleasant to
| front line workers. It isn't.
| lupusreal wrote:
| Indeed. I think anything short of tossing your drink at
| McDonalds workers probably doesn't phase them. They deal
| with much worse shit from the public than somebody
| snarking at the premise of having an app.
| zamadatix wrote:
| I think that reaction stems more from the comment
| outright seeking to create a hostile atmosphere about it,
| not from being clear on preferences in itself.
|
| It's the same thing with customers who make a big scene
| about a missing fries or something. 99% of the time it's
| not a problem and nobody cares - here's your fries, have
| a nice day. 1% of the time the person cares less about
| the fries and more about being hostile about it on
| principle/for fun/for respect/because they are in a bad
| mood/whatever, and those are the ones that suck to deal
| with when you're there but not in charge.
| rkomorn wrote:
| The context of the comment I was replying was "The person
| mandating the question doesn't care if you sound hostile
| to the person at the window".
|
| So the premise is "the customer is hostile".
| britzkopf wrote:
| I was a customer facing employee for a company whose
| underhanded policies caused me to face a lot of
| (legitimate) hostility. I eventually quit for this
| reason, and I know at least one other employee who did.
| That company lost two otherwise good employees. It works,
| it's just a question of how much collateral damage you're
| ok with. If management want to use front facing employees
| to shelter them from customer grievance, what other
| target to people have?
| worik wrote:
| Yes. But...
|
| It is a bit off to attack the drones of a corporate,
| albethey the only available target?
|
| Do you really need that burger? Better to boycot them
| entirety
|
| (Easy for me to say, I dispise MacDonalds food)
| pixl97 wrote:
| The particular problem here is there's no feedback as to
| why you boycott them.
|
| You see, the following headline has more effect on CEO's
| and decision makers
|
| "McD's sales drop 10% after customers refuse the app and
| other forms of spying" --Forbes
|
| If it's a silent boycott then you see stupid headlines
| like
|
| "Are millennials killing McD?"
|
| Remember the entire purpose isn't so that one company
| doesn't track you with an app, is so every company
| figures out tracking you with an app is a bad idea.
| zamadatix wrote:
| So write to the news. The problem is not lack of
| publicity avenue, it's too few people seem to care enough
| about apps selling their data to make the headlines in
| the first place. They'd rather just get the burger and
| not care.
| rkomorn wrote:
| Did things change after you left?
| slg wrote:
| This is such a weird mindset. How much interaction do you
| think the person hearing your response has with the person in
| corporate that made them all ask that question?
|
| Being rude or hostile to service people, even just mildly,
| because of corporate decisions is not only ineffective, but
| it's also cruel.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Rudeness in hostility is in how you state your position.
| Having a position (that you dislike and won't participate
| in a corporate sales funnel is always OK, and it's always
| OK to politely express that to representatives of the
| corporation. Even if they happen to be employees of the
| franchise owner, they're wearing the uniform and promoting
| the brand, rather than representing 'local burger
| restaurant.' Of course, you can just not eat there at all
| (I don't) but in that case no communication is taking
| place. Many people are OK with McDonalds' food offerings
| but not with their invasive app marketing.
| slg wrote:
| Trust me, no communication is happening in either
| situation. Your complaint is not being run up the
| corporate ladder. All you're doing is making someone's
| day a bit worse in order to get some fleeting feeling of
| self-satisfaction for voicing your opinion. You're of
| course free to be that person, but the rest of us are
| free to judge you for it.
| munk-a wrote:
| In the modern corporate world that leadership has
| entirely insulated itself from customer feedback - if it
| was plausible to voice your opinion through more
| appropriate channels I'd advocate for that but many
| companies have purposefully shut those channels down.
|
| What is the better option to pass along that message than
| modestly increasing retraining costs for that position?
|
| I treat service workers with respect, personally, but I
| am struggling to see what other venues of communication
| are still available.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| 1) Stop using the service.
|
| 2) Directly email them anyone who might have some say in
| the matter.
|
| 3) Make public posts on social media about your position.
|
| You still may not get heard, but all of these have better
| odds than complaining to the front-line service workers.
| slg wrote:
| Like I said in my other comment, this is missing the
| point. This approach won't be effective. Nothing is
| actually being communicated to the people making
| decisions. The difficulty in finding another more
| effective approach doesn't change that fact. If you feel
| passionate about this issue, you should try some of the
| suggestions by the other commenter.
| anidines wrote:
| > but the rest of us are free to judge you for it.
|
| FALSE.
|
| In today's economy and politics of normalized and
| systemic dark pattern enshittification, fomenting discord
| toward the turtles all the way down is a responsible
| civic duty of a disgruntled public captured and corralled
| by corporate monopolies with no exits.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I do not trust you, because I have been a food service
| worker and actually know what I'm talking about. A
| customer expressing a preference has never bothered me if
| they weren't rude about it. If it happens often enough it
| does get passed on, even though the individual impact of
| any counter conversation is low. You are trying to turn
| normal amicable commercial interactions into some kind of
| moral purity test.
| slg wrote:
| > I have been a food service worker and actually know
| what I'm talking about.
|
| Same here.
|
| > A customer expressing a preference has never bothered
| me if they weren't rude about it.
|
| A lot of people are seemingly skipping over OP describing
| their behavior as creating a "hostile atmosphere". That
| is inherently rude.
|
| > If it happens often enough it does get passed on
|
| But we aren't talking about just telling your manager.
| There are so many layers of management and bureaucracy
| with larger corporations, especially ones with a
| structure like McDonalds' franchise model, that these
| complaints will not make it to the decision makers.
| jollyllama wrote:
| Fair enough, but where do you draw the line? What if they
| ask you for ID for a burger? What if they ask to see your
| browsing history? Or your medical history? At what point is
| "I will never give that to you" or "Ha ha, no" justified?
| alistairSH wrote:
| At some point you just buy your burger elsewhere. "Can I
| see ID!" is absolutely across that "go elsewhere" line.
| No need to be rude, just stopping giving your money to
| them.
| slg wrote:
| These questions are missing the point. The person you're
| talking to has no control over the policy so any response
| directly to them is not going to impact that policy which
| means the objectionable nature of the policy and your
| desire to change it are irrelevant. If you're so deeply
| offended by the question, either stop patronizing the
| business or voice your criticism in a more constructive
| manner like trying to reach out to corporate or
| organizing some consumer action. Don't go the easy and
| lazy route of attacking the messenger.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| The problem is that your response is precisely what the
| corporate decision-makers rely on to insulate themselves
| from criticism.
|
| That doesn't mean that you are wrong: there is no point
| protesting to a cashier. My point is that there is no
| realistic or effective way for us to actually communicate
| to the corporate decision makers that rule our world. This
| becomes even more true as corporations consolidate power,
| which is precisely the "enshittification" that Cory
| Doctorow has been writing about.
| irl_zebra wrote:
| We shouldn't be rude or hostile to people, but expressing
| your disapproval or displeasure definitely can (and in my
| experience, has) caused a chain reaction enough over time
| the corp makes changes.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| No one said to be rude, let alone cruel, to service people.
| Talk about a weird mindset.
|
| No one said anything that evenr remotely implied the
| cashier has the ear of the ceo. Talk about a weird mindset.
|
| It's entirely valid, in fact it's positive, being helpful
| by being informative, to tell a business what you want or
| why you are not going to buy their product, instead of
| simply not buying their product.
|
| It's for damned sure valid to tell them what you would
| preferr if for some reason you are forced by circumstances
| or priorities to buy their product under duress.
|
| This whole comment is only 2 sentences yet manages to have
| like a dozen different facets of weird mindset if you
| unpack it all.
| slg wrote:
| The original comment talked about intentionally creating
| a "hostile atmosphere". Doing that for no other reason
| than making yourself feel better is rude and cruel to the
| people who have to deal with your hostility.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Being rude or hostile
|
| I think that answer is neither inherently rude nor hostile.
| slg wrote:
| Some of these responses really confuse me. "Hostile" was
| OP's own word not mine.
| slumberlust wrote:
| I just say 'Im allergic to apps.'
| anal_reactor wrote:
| It's really evil that corporations closed all ways of
| giving feedback, and the ones that remained are considered
| bad manners because "think of poor employees".
| heavyset_go wrote:
| The teenager on the other end of the headset isn't the person
| you should be fighting this battle against.
| pixl97 wrote:
| "Well, I'll tell you what, pal. I am not mad at you, okay?
| I am mad at the system. Okay, but unfortunately the system
| isn't here for me to direct my frustrations at it--" Dennis
| reactordev wrote:
| You can simply reply no, and be polite about it.
|
| You'll be asked the next time you visit, guaranteed. No
| matter your attitude so why be mean?
| ang_cire wrote:
| It's a good thing that decision-making executives are the
| ones who hear what you say into the squawk-box. And that the
| local employees get to decide how to answer, and aren't on a
| mandatory script.
| gruez wrote:
| >Finally I understand why when the McDonalds app was introduced
| it asked for permission to access my contacts
|
| Maybe it did at some point but it's not in the list of
| permissions on Android
|
| https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mcdonalds....
| worik wrote:
| "Financial information " is on the list...
|
| ...I am thinking that does not include payslips....
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| Interesting. But emails is still there. Wonder what that
| means.
| rolph wrote:
| careful !
|
| https://survivalfreedom.com/how-much-does-it-cost-mcdonalds-...
| [2023]
|
| https://hpshplaidline.org/2024/02/08/breaking-down-the-cost-...
| [2024]
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| >> I wonder if selling personal information makes them more
| money than selling hamburgers.
|
| Historically it's been a real estate company due to the vast
| portfoloio and usually prime locations. Not sure if this is
| still the case.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| It can be interesting to look at all the servers these apps try
| to reach after being installed
|
| Unless one is using something like GrapheneOS, Android/iOS "app
| permissions" do not meaningfully impede data collection
|
| As long as apps can connect to the internet, data can be
| collected. By design Android/iOS does not enable users to deny
| internet access to specific apps. That design is not a
| coincidence
| grues-dinner wrote:
| > By design Android/iOS does not enable users to deny
| internet access to specific apps.
|
| It does seem like the number one permission you might wish to
| choose not to grant, doesn't it?
|
| In a privacy-first design there could also be an API for an
| encrypted channel that the user has access to, rather than
| allowing the device to send mysterious black-box data from
| your device on your behalf in the background whenever it
| wants. Though I suppose it would just turn into base64
| "plaintext" payloads quickly and become normalised rather
| than a neon sign of fuckery afoot.
| lreeves wrote:
| On iOS you can deny an app cellular data access which
| accomplishes this, as long as you don't launch it on Wifi.
| But yes I too wish I could deny apps internet access
| completely.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "... as long as you don't launch it on WiFi."
|
| Unfortunately, apps can still connect even when they are
| not "launched"
|
| There are ways to deny apps internet access completely. But
| this is not something that is provided by Apple or Google
| realo wrote:
| It would be cool to have some form of filtering vpn to do
| just that and easy to deploy on a personal vm provider.
|
| Maybe I should ask Claude Code to kludge together something.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| To me, the differences between iOS and Android are
| insignificant. Both corporate OS suck, and there are other
| corporate OS that suck, too
|
| The fundamental similarity is that Apple does not protect the
| Apple computer owner^1 from Apple anymore than Google
| protects Android users from Google
|
| Like Google, Apple collects data and profits from ad
| services. The Apple hardware buyer becomes the product after
| purchase. Apple profits from selling access to the hardware
| owner to myriad third parties. It's always making deals
|
| Like the one with Google we learned about in the government's
| antitrust case. But I digress
|
| There was a meme something like, "Unless you're paying, you
| are the product". But it's also possible to pay and be the
| product. For example, when someone purchases an individual
| Windows license from Microsoft, after purchase the company is
| still going to _require_ them to create an "account", connect
| to the internet and be subjected to data collection
|
| Both iOS and Android have "app stores" (MS copies this, too),
| both expect and intend these "app stores" to earn them
| revenue from advertising, e.g., allowing apps to do
| surveillance, data collections and show ads
|
| 1. who is forced to use iOS. No "unlocked" bootloaders. No
| custom ROMs
| walkabout wrote:
| They also punish you by charging _wildly_ higher prices without
| the app. You have to use the app just to get prices around what
| they "should" be, compared with the pre-app era and adjusting
| for the broader inflation rate.
|
| Like clearly they're OK with forcing a choice between "use the
| app" and "never eat McDonalds again", because that's
| effectively what they're doing, and they have to know it.
| soupfordummies wrote:
| I always hear this but I've never found this. The couple of
| times a year I eat McDonald's I check and it's the same.
| There are specific deals they'll have in the app like "2
| filet of fish for $7 instead of $4 each" or something but by
| and large the prices are the same.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| There's also the price discrimination angle of it. McDonald's
| has at least two sizeable groups of customers: people who
| frequently eat there, and are thus a change in the McDonald's
| pricing is significant in their total budget, and people who
| will occasionally eat there.
|
| Presumably, some analyst at McDonald's found that the latter
| group wasn't particularly price sensitive, so they found a
| way to divide the two groups, and charge them different
| prices. The occasional McDonald's customer isn't going to
| jump through hoops, they just want to roll up, get their
| burger, and leave. The frequent customer is more likely to
| respond to changes in pricing _in both directions_. Having a
| system to actively prompt the frequent consumers to go more
| often, and then charge them a price that they are willing to
| pay, while still getting the full benefit of the people who
| don 't really care how much food costs is a win-win from
| their perspective.
|
| The surveillance is just a sweetener.
| ProfessorLayton wrote:
| I fall squarely in the second camp, but what ended up
| happening was that I went from going occasionally, to not
| going at all.
|
| McDonald's app-free pricing is now butting against actual
| sit-down restaurants, or a good local shop. I'm not price
| sensitive per se, but I don't want a raw deal, so I'll pick
| the better option. McD's used to be cheap and fast, now
| it's neither really.
|
| Their sales are falling, and they're doing $5 deals now, so
| I'm definitely not the only one picking other options.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| Yeah, they definitely got greedy with it. My go-to
| example is to point out the fact that In-N-Out used to be
| the fast food option for when you were willing to pay a
| few extra bucks to be served a better burger by someone
| who didn't look like they wanted to kill themselves. Now
| they're the cheapest option, by a substantial margin, and
| they didn't change a damn thing.
| anothernewdude wrote:
| I'm more okay with never eating from what are, by my use
| anyway, public restrooms than installing some app.
| eek2121 wrote:
| ...which is why I don't eat McDonald's. Also, don't forget,
| the app limits your legal rights as well. No lawsuit or class
| action for you, bub.
| cwyers wrote:
| ```When Uber entered the taxi market without securing taxi
| licenses or extending the workforce protections required under
| law, it said the move didn't count because it did it with an
| app.```
|
| It's so weird to see the first half of this article written as an
| ode to the virtues of competition and then see the sharp pivot
| into defending taxi medallions. Say what you will about Uber, but
| no Uber driver has ever tried to lie and harass a passenger over
| whether or not the credit card machine is broken in an effort to
| cheat on their taxes. It's not even like the anti-consumer
| hostility of the taxi experience translated into better rights
| for workers, the high price of a medallion meant in practice your
| typical cab driver was in a situation damned close to indentured
| servitude to a medallion company.
|
| And to top it all off, taxis demonstrate the fallacy of thinking
| that hundreds of market participants provides meaningful benefits
| from competition. In a market with a suitably large number of cab
| drivers and passengers, the odds of repeat business between any
| pair of driver and passenger is low enough that neither party is
| incentivized to treat each other well. It's not like anyone was
| pulling out a Yelp-like site or review book to pick the best-
| reviewed cab drivers, or like you went out of your way to stick
| with a cab driver you'd had a good experience with. Meaningful
| competition requires that people can make _informed_ choices, and
| without repeat business you don't get participants informed
| enough to make meaningful choices between market participants. It
| also requires leverage. It doesn't matter if you threaten to take
| your business elsewhere next time if you and they both know _you
| were going to anyway_.
|
| I'm not saying that Uber is perfect, or even that Uber couldn't
| be productively regulated better by the government. I'm saying
| that taxis were a terrible experience, and I don't trust Doctorow
| to have a good lay of the land when he focuses more on his
| ideology than the evidence. If subscribing to Doctorow's beliefs
| requires services to look more like taxis than Ubers, you can
| count me out.
| usrxcghghj wrote:
| > sharp pivot into defending taxi medallions.
|
| This is a deflection. Cory is not coming out in defense of taxi
| medallions so much as it is a re-iteration of the current laws
| in place and how tech uses apps to get around the laws. Yes
| taxis suck, but also so does uber in their own way - This is
| all beside the point. These tech companies are using 'gig'ified
| models to get around laws set by the city officials elected by
| the people.
| cwyers wrote:
| The opening of the article is laying out the case that the
| laws are good -- they make the market legible to
| participants. As he says:
|
| ``` To navigate all of these technical minefields, you need
| the help of a third party. In a modern society, that third
| party is an expert regulator who investigates or anticipates
| problems in their area of expertise and then makes rules
| designed to solve these problems.
|
| To make these rules, the regulator convenes a truth-seeking
| exercise, in which all affected parties submit evidence about
| what the best rule should be and then get a chance to read
| what everyone else wrote and rebut their claims. Sometimes,
| there are in-person hearings, or successive rounds of comment
| and counter-comment, but that's the basic shape of things.
|
| Once all the evidence is in, the regulator--who is a neutral
| expert, required to recuse themselves if they have conflicts
| --makes a rule, citing the evidence on which the rule is
| based. This whole system is backstopped by courts, which can
| order the process to begin anew if the new rule isn't
| supported by the evidence created while the regulator was
| developing the record.
|
| This kind of adversarial process--something between a court
| case and scientific peer review--has a good track record of
| producing high-quality regulations. You can thank a process
| like this for the fact that you weren't killed today by
| critters in your tap water or a high-voltage shock from one
| of your home's electrical outlets. ```
|
| And this is central to Doctorow's point, right? The narrow
| question of the legality of Uber's current service offerings
| is actually pretty well litigated, and if Uber was as
| flagrantly illegal as he claims, "we're an app" wouldn't have
| kept them in business. Doctorow argues that this is happening
| through regulatory capture -- the case isn't primarily that
| Uber is violating the currently existing set of laws,
| regulations, court precedents, etc. It's that Uber is
| violating what the regulations _would be_ in a world where
| they had less market power with which to influence
| regulations.
|
| And so it's not enough to argue about how the apps get around
| _current_ laws. By Doctorow's own arguments, we're debating
| the merits of a counterfactual set of different regulations
| that we would have if you changed current conditions. And at
| that point, it is absolutely fair game to ask if this
| counterfactual set of different regulations is actually
| better for market participants.
| zajio1am wrote:
| (depends on jurisdiction) there was already concept of pre-
| booked transport that was distinct from taxi and does not
| require taxi medaillon to operate. Uber just made pre-booked
| transport as convenient to use as taxi.
|
| So it is not that Uber avoided taxi licencing 'because of
| app', but it avoided taxi licencing by providing slightly
| different service that do not fit into legal definition of
| regulated taxi services. And one could argue that these
| slight differences are in fact important, because the reason
| why taxis are tightly regulated are for reasons that mostly
| do not apply to Uber.
| cwyers wrote:
| The Doctorow school argument, as best I can tell, would go
| 'the regulations on black car service were meant for things
| like limo services that don't compete directly with taxis,
| and once Uber started competing directly with taxis,
| regulators and authorities should have moved more
| aggressively to write new regulations/laws that regulated
| Uber the same way taxis are regulated.' They would not
| agree with "the reason why taxis are tightly regulated are
| for reasons that mostly do not apply to Uber."
|
| And this is exactly why I think the question of "what is
| the correct way to regulate car ride services" shouldn't
| hinge on incumbency bias towards taxis, but actually ask
| the question of what is best for participants in the market
| (which doesn't just include taxis and Ubers but also
| includes public transportation and its users, for
| instance). But that doesn't fit neatly into Doctorow's
| enshitification narrative.
| mossTechnician wrote:
| These claims of incumbency bias, based on a fragment of a
| sentence, seem unnecessarily presumptive.
|
| I've read a bit of his work, seen a couple of his
| speeches, and don't have the same conclusions about his
| opinions. You could probably ask for clarification.
| sosodev wrote:
| So breaking the law is ok if you don't agree with it?
| fragmede wrote:
| That _is_ how change is made. See also: Civil Rights Act,
| circa 1964
| kg wrote:
| Whether or not taxi medallions are a good thing I hope we
| can agree that there's a gulf between Rosa Parks and Travis
| Kalanick?
| jrowen wrote:
| There's a difference in terms of their motives and
| methods and the surrounding context, but, ultimately it's
| just actions and consequences and a messy collective
| decision-making process. The collective ruling body has
| thus far decided that Uber be allowed to continue and the
| conversations and laws continue to evolve around these
| things. Nobody is calling Travis a hero but we've
| [collectively] agreed that there was some value to some
| of those decisions.
| fragmede wrote:
| Let's look at that gulf. One's a poor black woman in the
| 1960's and the other's a rich white guy in the 2010's.
| It's easy to see which one we've been programmed to be
| supportive of. But picking someone based on the color of
| their skin and not the content of their character isn't
| what we're going for. So we have to be explicit in saying
| that the documented actions by this particular rich white
| guy are what people find offensive about him, rather than
| simply that he is one.
|
| In terms of societal change though, they both had a bad
| law in front of them, they both broke it. In Rosa Parks'
| case, the law got changed. In Travis Kalanick's case, new
| laws got passed specifically regulating his company. But
| the thing is, the taxi medallion laws haven't actually
| gone away. This results in Uber having to do things in
| weird ways to satisfy the letter of the law in order to
| comply with the various laws that exist in each
| jurisdiction.
|
| Travis Kalanick got rich off the backs of an army of
| drivers and a swath of passengers. Rosa Parks did not.
|
| He did some pretty shitty stuff along the way, sure.
|
| One thing about Rosa Parks is that she wasn't the first.
| It was because she was the woman who wasn't going to fall
| to ad hominem attacks. We can name the logical fallacy,
| but unfortunately it works in the unregulated court of
| public opinion.
|
| Neither was Travis, but they were both the ones that
| succeeded. She succeeded in changing minds and laws, and
| he succeeded in making a pile of money.
|
| So there's absolutely a gulf between the two, and that
| gulf is that the laws about sitting in the back of the
| bus got struck down. The taxi laws did not. One happens
| to be a rich white guy and the other happens to be a not-
| exactly-well-off black woman, and the black woman
| actually managed to get the laws changed.
| why_only_15 wrote:
| taking into account all the impacts on society, uber is a
| substantial improvement on what came before. sometimes laws
| are bad and it is good when you break them
| landl0rd wrote:
| Actually most people agree that legality and morality are
| overlapping but separate categories. There are legal and
| immoral things as well as illegal but moral ones. I have no
| problem with someone breaking a law I see as immoral if the
| act itself is morally positive or neutral. It is a matter of
| benefit versus odds of being caught.
|
| For example, do you think it is immoral for marijuana people
| to consume their drug of choice? It remains federally
| illegal.
| jrowen wrote:
| Yes? The law is not some absolute arbiter of morality and it
| does change across time and jurisdictions. It's really only
| an expression of consequences that may be enforced by a body
| of power.
|
| In many situations an individual does not feel represented by
| a certain law and it's equally ok for them to choose to
| follow their own moral compass as it is for the people who
| put that law in place to attempt to enforce their ways.
| mtlynch wrote:
| > _Say what you will about Uber, but no Uber driver has ever
| tried to lie and harass a passenger over whether or not the
| credit card machine is broken in an effort to cheat on their
| taxes._
|
| This actually did happen to me. When I was in Hyderabad, I took
| an Uber from my company's office to the airport, and the driver
| said his phone died right after picking me up, so I had to pay
| cash.
| cwyers wrote:
| Yeah, it's a real thing that happened to me, to. In multiple
| US cities. And I'm sure we're far from alone.
| jasonthorsness wrote:
| Uber is almost always cash in cities I've visited in India.
| Some take UPI too but it's hard to use that as a foreigner.
| HanShotFirst wrote:
| I want to gently push back on this from my perch in NYC. Pre-
| Uber, taxis had their monopolistic issues but were: - available
| at most times on major thoroughfares with a raise of the hand.
| - reliable - I was never once jerked around or overcharged by
| an NYC yellow cab, which I can not say about private cab
| companies I've seen in other cities.
|
| The worst problem was finding cabs in the outer boroughs, and
| that was improved greatly with the "green cab" program (they
| were restricted to beginning their fares in the outer
| boroughs).
|
| There's been a lot of time and gradual change since then, but
| what I see now (Post-Uber): - In most of the city, it is
| difficult or impossible to hail a cab without an app. - The
| Uber/app drivers are worse, clearly much less experienced and
| don't know where they are going. - Price gouging has been
| outsourced to the app itself, and happens very frequently. -
| Even once cabs are called on the app they often cancel or fail
| to show in anywhere near the advertised time.
|
| Personally, I greatly prefer the Pre-Uber situation.
| Kronopath wrote:
| I want to push back against your pushback as someone who's
| lived in both NYC and the SF area. I agree with you that Uber
| barely made sense in Manhattan. I never once used it and
| taxis were plentiful.
|
| I've since realized that in the US, NYC is an exception. When
| I first came to SF and Seattle for job interview related
| things, I used taxis, only to find out that the taxis were so
| terrible I never used them again:
|
| - In the suburbs of Seattle, I was given a taxi chit from the
| place I was interviewing. I called in for a cab and had to
| wait over a half an hour for one to pick me up.
|
| - In SF, the airport cab I was using had his GPS unmounted
| from his dash, and ended up handing me the machine and asking
| me to help him navigate from the back seat. Then when we got
| to the hotel, he lamented my choice to pay by credit card as
| it meant he would get the money much later than if he had
| cash. After I told him I didn't have the circa $100 in cash
| he was charging, he sadly acquiesced, then proceeded to take
| a literal paper rubbing imprint of the card number before I
| could leave.
|
| I like to say that the Bay Area made Uber make sense, both in
| terms of urban planning and in terms of how terrible taxis
| were.
|
| And I think those may be related: if you can get around well
| in a place like NYC using public transit or walking, taxis
| have to be a lot more attractive in order to justify their
| existence. In SF or Seattle they had much less competition
| due to the suburban sprawl and worse public transit.
| gs17 wrote:
| > In its promotional materials, Plexure uses the example of
| charging extra for your breakfast sandwich on payday.
|
| You would hope this would be awful PR for them and anyone using
| their services. What disgusting corporate sociopathy.
| kmikeym wrote:
| It's not new. McD acquired 'Dynamic Yield' back in 2019 and has
| long been using big data. There is an case study from 2020 about
| it called "McDonald's: Can A Behemoth Lead in the Era of
| Artificial Intelligence?" by Fabrizio DiMuro of the University of
| Winnipeg.
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